✣ Highlights from the week online
Three creative minds helping the homeless At Aleteia, Elizabeth Pardi described three “creative and impressive ways” in which people are helping the homeless. There’s California builder Gregory Kloehn, who makes mobile shelters: simple huts on wheels, constructed from leftover building materials. “It’s a blessing to have my little home,” Rhonda, one of Greg’s homeless recipients, told People. “When I lock my little door at night, I go to sleep with peace of mind.” Then there’s Boston’s Kenji Nakayama, who gets to know homeless individuals and makes signs for them to hold, the better to explain their situation to passers-by. “The more I do this project, the more I have been learning about the community and becoming more aware of the variety of problems that homeless people have,” she says. And then there’s Veronika Scott, who invented a kind of jacket that can double as a sleeping bag. Hundreds have been distributed in Detroit. Stop worrying about the Pope, start living Bloggers disagreed this week over the right attitude towards Pope Francis. At Standing on my Head, Fr Dwight Longenecker said: “I hear rumblings and grumblings about the Pope, about Amoris Laetitia and just about everything else, and the grumblings are becoming increasingly sour and nasty.” Conservative Catholics need to accept that “Francis is the Pope. Get used to it and get busy being Catholic. You think Pope Francis is so bad? Read some Church history. Pope Francis is not so bad.” Fr Longenecker said he personally preferred Benedict XVI, but that was just his preference. “Can I listen and learn from Pope Francis? Sure. He’s my Pope. Can faithful Catholics criticise the Pope? Sure. That’s also part of being Catholic. We’re a big Italian family. We fight sometimes. That’s how we love each other.” The laity should make their concerns known But at Dominus Mihi Adjutor, Fr Hugh Somerville-Knapman said some recent papal statements were “alarming”. It was “laudable”, Fr Somerville-Knapman wrote, that Catholics “feel an instinctive loyalty to the Pope, and long may it last. But an instinctive loyalty need not be, and should not be, an unthinking one … By baptism we are, with and in Christ whose Body together we form, prophets, priests and kings. We have a dignity that should not make us proud but should not make us servile.” Saints such as St Catherine of Siena, St Bridget of Sweden and St Peter Damian “spoke the truth to power, even papal power”. So, today, there is nothing wrong with speaking up. “It should be done with respect and even humility, but it should be done.” In the present “period of crisis in the Church”, Fr Somerville-Knapman wrote, “it behoves us all to speak the truth in love. Without it, the Church risks becoming what Pope Francis explicitly abhors – an NGO.”
